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SPEECH 




HON. MONTGOMERY BLAIR, 



CAUSES (W THE REBELLION 

« 



II Support of the President's Plan of Pacification, 



)EI.IVEREn liEKORE THE 



LEGISLATURE OF MARYLAND 



AT A W l?« A P © IL (1 : 



On the S£^d of Janua-ry, lS6Jf. 



«8 

m 



BALTIMORE: 
PRINTED HY SHERWOOD & CO. 

i,„^^ 18 64. 



SPEECH 



HON. MONTGOMERT BLAIR, 



CAUSES OF THE REBELLION 



Support of tlie President's Flan of Pacification, 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



LEGISLATUEE OF MARYLAND, 



AT ANNAPOLIS. 



Cn the Q2d of January, 1^64. 




B A L T I JI R E : 

PRINTED BY SHERWOOD & CO, 

1 8 G 4r. 

u 



SPEECH 



Fellow Citizens : — 

The President's recent message manifests liis continued 
solicitude for your interests. He says : 

'' The movements by State action for emancipation in 
''several of the States, not included in the emancipation 
" proclamation, are matters of profound gratulation. And 
'^ while 1 do not repeat in detail what I have heretofore so 
'' earnestly urged upon this subject, my general views and 
'' feelings remain unchanged ; and I trust-that Congresswill 
'' omit no fair opportunity of aiding those important steps 
''to a great consummation." 

This is a renewed effort to redeem the pledge given in 
his emancipation proclamation and in a former message 
to Congress, to exert all his poAver to indemnify every 
loyal citizen for losses of slaves sustained from the acts of 
the Government in prosecuting the war. The proclama- 
tion of amnesty appended to the late message extends the 
benefit of the indemnity proclaimed previously to that 
white class once embarked in the secession cause, but that 
now abandons it and takes the oath of loyalty and adhe- 
sion to the Constitution, the leaders of the rebellion only 
excepted. This is more than a pardon ; not only does the 
President spare the lives of the unfortunate dupes of con- 
spirators, but he restores them their property. 

Another indulgence is granted by the late proclamation 
to the victims of the fraud and artifice, or what has been 
far more prevalent, the secretly-embodied military power 



of the contrivers of the rebellion. It is the invitation to 
participate again as bretliren in the Government on re- 
suming relations of sincere loyalty to it. 

A third advance looks to the perfect restoration of State 
rights in the Union, by means of the loyal popillar suf- 
frage within the several States, thus recognizing their 
constitutions as existing and obligatory in everything but 
in that feature which made the war — and which the war 
has for the most part obliterated — slavery. Even as to 
slavery, its subjects — wlio as freedmen are brought into 
new relations with the States — are remitted to the States, 
the President promising to support " any provisions which 
" may be adopted by such State government in relation to 
'' the freed people of such State, v/hicli shall recognize and 
" declare their permanent freedom, provide for their educa- 
" tion, and which may yet be consistent as a temporary ar- 
"rangement, with their present condition as a laboring, 
*' landless, and homeless class.'' 

These clauses manifest a willingness to refer the changes 
in State constitutions relating to slavery, which the war 
resulting from it shows to be necessary to the people and 
States most affected. This harmonizes with the great 
principle on which the Government rests. If the Presi- 
dent's benign and patriotic suggestion be received with 
favor by the friends of free government, bound up in the 
Union, and based on the grand, all-pervading principle of 
the Declaration of Independence, it will become evident 
to all the world that there is an innate vital power in our 
Constitution that can heal the worst disorders to which 
it might be subjected. 

It is our duty now to put to shame the advocates of mon- 
arcliy, oligarchy and aristocracy. The majesty of a great, 
free people is invoked to achieve this great Avork, The 
nation is appealed to by the President to sanction, by its 
co-operation, the design which with him is but suggestion. 

The man at the head of the Republic vaunts no military 
prowess as a substitute for the nation's will. He is no 



Cromwell. Congress is no military council. We have 
no Carnot to organize victory. The Government embodies 
the will of a free people, and that imparts an impulse 
through faithful representatives that renders the Kepuhlic 
irresistible in a good work. The suppression of the re- 
bellion and the elimination of slavery from this country 
is the herculean labor before it. Its accomplishment will 
convince the nations that popular suffrage is the true sov- 
ereignty, whether to wield the sword against those who 
defy it or to heal the wounds it is compelled to inflict in 
asserting its authority. I hope you will bear with me 
while bringing under review the series of steps which 
have brought us to the issues presented in the President's 
plan of pacification to show the wisdom of the plan, and 
that the patriots of all parties should unite in giving 
effect to it. 

Nothing was more conspicuous throughout tlie struggle 
of the colonies with Great Britain than the stern devotion 
of the founders of the Government to the public good. 
They sacrificed all personal and party considerations to 
subserve it. This simple feeling, this instinct of the 
heart, created this glorious empire of freedom. It wij.1 re- 
establish it on more enduring foundations. 

Monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, are different modes of 
the same thing. It is monopoly by a few of the rights of 
the many to appropriate their labor. It was not against 
the forms of government that our forefathers rose in resist- 
ance to the mother country. On the contrary, the hearts 
of the people were full of loyalty even to a king until 
tjiey found him to be a tyrant. 

The most striking manifestation of the king's tyranny 
is thus portrayed in the original of the Declaration of In- 
dependence : 

'' He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, 
" violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the 
" persons of a distant people who never offended him, cap- 
" tivating them, and carrying,them into slavery in another 
'' hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transpor- 



6 

" tation tliitlier. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of 
''Infidel Powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of 
'' Grreat Britain. Determined to keep o|:)en a market where 
''men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted liis 
" negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to pro- 
" hibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, and tliat this 
' ' assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished 
" die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms 
" among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has 
" deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also 
" obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed 
" against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he 
" urges them to commit against the lives of another." 

But this " piratical warfare against human nature " 
had its origin, not in the personal cluiracter of the British 
king. It sprung from ihat S'pirit of monojoohj Avliich has 
ever, and will forever, animate arbitrary power. The 
European potentates had learned, as the first principle of 
kingcraft, that he who commanded the labor of a nation 
became its master. Hence that monstrous usurpation so 
strongly marked with the reprobation of Jefferson and 
his colleagues in the original draft of the Declaration of 
Independence. The monarchs of England and Spain, re- 
solved on keeping their colonies in absolute subjection, 
looked to a monopoly of tlie African slave trade as the 
means of enforcing it. 

The treaty of Utrecht stipulated, says Bancroft: 
" For the Spanish world in the Gulf of Mexico, on the 
"Atlantic, and along the Pacific, as well as for the English 
"colonies, that her Britannic Majesty (by persons of her 
" appointment,) was the exclusive slave trader." " Eng- 
" land extorted the privilege of filling the New World with 
" negroes, as great profits were anticipated from the trade. 
"Philip v., of Spain, took one quarter of the common 
" stock, agreeing to pay for it by a stock note. Queen Anne 
"reserved to herself another quarter, and the remaining 
" moiety was to be divided among her subjects. Thus did 
" the sovereigns of England and Spain become the largest 



'' slave merchants in tlie world. Lady Masham promised 
^^ herself a share of the profits, but Harley, (prime minis- 
^' ter,) who had good sense, and was most free from avarice, 
'' advised the assignment of her Majesty's portion of the 
'' stock to the South Sea Company. 

" Controlling the trade in slaves, who cost nothing hut 
''trinkets, and toys, and refuse arms, England gained by 
" the sale of the children of Africa into bondage in Amer- 
" ica, the capital which built up and confirmed a British 
" empire in Hindostan. The political effects of this traffic 
" were equally perceptible in the West Indies. The mer- 
''cantile system, of which the whole colonial system was 
" the essential branch, culminated in the slave trade, and in 
' ' the commercial policy adopted with regard to the chief pro- 
" duce of slave labor." 

Here is the clue to the conspiracy of kings which made 
negro slavery its fulcrum. It is an instinctive fact that 
the conspiracy of the slaveholders — the oligarchs in the 
South — against the free (xovernments of this continent, 
originated in the same passions, avarice, and ambition, 
looking to territorial conquest and political power, and 
negro slavery was alike the instrument of both. No fact 
could more strongly elucidate the immense force which the 
absolute control of a system of slavery, though wielding 
a mass of the lowest caste of laborers, may exert over 
greater numbers of a middle order not so concentrated under 
a single will. The monopoly wrested by England from 
Spain made the monarch of the latter kingdom dependent 
on the former, as a joint stock-holder in the slave trade 
with a company of her merchant princes, sharing their 
scandalous profits in a merchandise which was to debase 
the Spanish provinces into fit subjection to such a master. 
And the historian also tells us how the British throne, 
although its occupant did not appropriate the mercenary 
products of the slave trade assiento to herself, but gave 
them to her great trading companies, fostered through the 
gains of their monopolies the conquest they were destined 
to achieve for England in India, Africa, and the South 



8 

Seas. Meantime the source of these gains — the sale of 
the negroes in the American colonies — was encouraged by 
the whole force of the parliamentary and royal authority 
and influence. All the efforts of the colonies, by legisla- 
tive enactments or otherwise, to stop the establishment of 
the slave system were vetoed by the king, and public 
opinion was invoked by declarations of Parliament '' that 
" the trade is highly beneficial and advantageous to the 
"kingdom and the colonies," and for that purpose, by 
statute, " the ports of Africa were laid open to English 
" competition," the statute expressly declaring that " the 
" slave trade is very advantageous to Glreat Britain;" and 
the bench of judges, " Holt and Pollexfen, and eight other 
"judges, in pursuance of an order of council, giving their 
" opinion that negroes are merchandise, and that therefore 
" the act of navigation was to be extended to the English 
" trade in them to the exclusion of aliens." The Crown 
encouraged the trade not only by orders to the colonial 
Governors, such as " the royal instruction of Queen Anne 
"to the Governor of New York and New Jersey to give 
" due encouragement to merchants, and in particular to 
"theEoyal African Company of England," but by pre- 
miums to purchasers, land being given to .emigrants " on 
" condition that the resident owner ivould keep four negroes 
''for every hundred acres." South Carolina, even, as late 
as 1760, united in the common efforts of the colonists to 
stop the increase of slavery ; but Bancroft says : 

"She only gained abuse from the English ministry. 
' Great Britain, steadily rejecting every colonial restric- 
' tion on the slave trade, instructed the Governor, on pain 
' of removal, not to give even a temporary assent to such 
' laws ; and but a year before the prohibition of the slave 
' trade by the American Congress in 1776, the Earl of 
' Dartmouth illustrated the tendency of the colonies, and 
' the policy of England, by addressing to a colonial agent 
' these memorable words : 'We cannot allow the colonies 
' ' to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so bene- 
' ' ficial to the nation.' " 



9 

The result of this systematic policy — building up a 
slave empire in the New World in furtherance of Great 
Britain's commercial ambition is thus summed up by 
Bancroft : 

" For the century previous to the prohibition of the 
" slave trade by the American Congress in 1776, we assume 
" the number imported by the English into the Spanish, 
" French and English West Indies, as well as the English 
" continental colonies, to have been, collectively, nearly 
"three millions, to which are to be added more than a 
" quarter of a million purchased in Africa and thrown 
"into the Atlantic on the passage. The gross returns 
" to English merchants for the whole traffic in that num- 
" her of slaves may have been not far from four hundred 
" million dollars." 

Well, what was Great Britain's commercial policy which 
slavery as adjunct was to consummate? Mr. Bancroft 
explains it in a paragraph based on documentary proof, in 
these words : 

" The white man emigrating became a dangerous free- 
" man. It was quite sure that the negroes of that cen- 
" tury would never profess republicanism ; their presence 
" in the colonies increased dependence. This reason was 
" avowed by a British merchant in 1745, in a political 
" tract entitled — ' The African Slave Trade — the Great 
" 'Pillar and Support of the British Plantation Trade 
"'in America.' Were it possible for white men to an- 
" swer the end ot negroes in planting, (it is there con- 
" tended,) our colonies would interfere with the manufac- 
" tures of these kingdoms. In such a case, indeed, we 
" might have just reason to dread the prosperity of our 
"colonies; but while we can suppfy them abundantly 
"with negroes we need be under no such apprehension. 
" Negro labor will keep our British colonies in due sub- 
" serviency to the interest of their mother country; for 
" while plantations depend only on planting by negroes, 
" our colonies can never prove injurious to British manu- 
" factures, never become independent of their kingdom." 



10 

Such was the British policy as associated with slavery. 
It is simple and consistent. The grand monopoly of the 
slave trade increased its navigation, increased its commerce 
with Africa and all European dependencies in the two 
Americas, increased its planting and other agricultural 
interests everywhere ; the negro laborer doing the work 
in the colonies, thus saving for home industry the peasan- 
try of the British Isles, that would otherwise emigrate, 
and become dangerous freemen. This slave system thus 
retarded the growth of the distant plantations by that 
hardy Anglo-Saxon yeomanry, which it was feared would 
soon acquire the independent spirit of the New World, 
that would endanger the supremac}^ of the mother country, 
rivalling her in arts, in arms, in commerce, and every 
species of enterprise. 

The monopoly thus gained by merchants over Africa, 
glutted by the profits of the " merchandise," in the shape 
of men transplanted to America, inspired their ambition 
to extend it over the East Indies ; and the result was the 
conquest of Hindostan, by the intrigues, corruption, com- 
mercial bargainings, sanctioned by treaties entered into 
with the native princes, and upheld by the diplomacy and 
arms of England ; a monopoly which steadily excluded 
from the East India possessions white emigrants ; a policy 
also adopted by our southern slaveholders. 

This was the thriving attitude of England's slave pol- 
icy, when the Congress of the Colonies passed the act of 
pi'ohibition in 1776, and Jefferson and his compeers charac- 
terized it in the Declaration of Independence with stronger 
terms of reproach against the king than any other in its 
category of Avrongs — tliat long list of ^^ repeated injuries 
and usurpations, all having in direct object the estahlishment 
of an absolute tyranny over these States." 

is it not amazing, that the slave States, having up to 
the hour of pronounced independence made war on the 
slave trade, and the Power that compelled submission to 
its aggravated mischiefs, should recoil from its denuncia- 
tion in that great State paper, written expressly to sum 



11 

up the grievances siifFered under the Grovernment it was 
designed to renounce as the only mode of deliverance from 
them ? No sooner was the paper read, than South Caro- 
lina and Georgia, then, as more recently, instinctively the 
prompters of the action of tlie South, when a question of 
slavery is involved, objected to the scathing clause — and 
why? ''A change came o'er the spirit of their dream." 
When the slave trade and slavery were instruments in the 
hands of the king, they saw them plied as a vast monop- 
oly to amass wealth and power for those having the con- 
trol, and to reduce to dependence those who were obliged to 
buy and live under the monopoly. The inhabitants of con- 
tinents and the markets of continents were under its sway. 
Slavery and the slave trade, under the management of a 
foreign Power, was a curse, but under the management of 
the masters of South Carolina and Georgia, promised 
much to avarice and ambition. The whole South soon 
perceived that an oligarchy of slaveholders could easily per- 
sonate the king, and profit by the lessons of the monopoly 
he established. How Avell they have applied and improved 
upon the precedents of their royal master, to which we 
have adverted, a glance at their course after they had ex- 
punged from our Magna Charta the passage provided to 
insure the extinction of the slave [^trade and slavery, wnll 
show. 

The first step of the slaveholders after assuming the 
royal prerogative in reference to slavery, was the demand 
to set aside the Congressional interdict against the slave 
trade. This was enforced by threats of dissolving the 
Union, so necessary to the establishment of our free infant 
institutions. A ncAv lease had to be granted to the slave 
trade, to save the Government from rebellion at its birth. 
Their next requisition was, that the political power over 
free men and free institutiolis, should be compounded with 
their domestic institution, asserting arbitrary authority 
over the African slaves among us. This, too, Avas con- 
ceded, as the price of unity and peace. The slave power 
acquired a constitutional right to representation in Con- 



12 

gress, for two-fiftlis of the persons it held in bondage. 
Thus endowed with the new political faculty of importing 
and breeding a population to legislate for the nation, the 
master-class in the South readily asserted the character of 
a privileged class. The capitalists, monopolizing the 
lands and the labor adequate to their cultivation, at 
once reduced the non-slaveholders to entire dependence 
upon them. They became tenants-at-will on the great do- 
main of the privileged order, and, although indulged with 
the right of suffrage, in effect it was but a choice between 
individuals of the same order, the invariable result being 
the election of all the higher functionaries, and the legis- 
lators, State and National, from that class, which, having 
command of the labor and land of the South, had also 
command of the votes of those who held their livings of 
them. Hence, the State and Congressional representation 
of the South, really represented the class consisting of 
some three hundred thousand persons, w^hose interests re- 
quired that the seven millions of the whites, equally de- 
pendent upon them, but less closely allied upon mercenary 
considerations, than the four millions of the black caste, 
should, for security and convenience, be held under the 
same law of passive obedience. With great art and suc- 
cess, the two southern castes of laborers have been 
played off against each other for this purpose ; and with like 
skill the southern chivalry, acting in concert, up©n the 
instinct of cemented interest, have, though a minority, 
by holding the balance of power between the two great 
parties of the free States, contrived to carry their plans 
for control in the national as well as the State govern- 
ments. 

The ambition of holding a vast domain — the spirit of 
all despotism for aggrandizement — soon succeeded to the 
indulgence of the slave owners in the prerogative which 
had again and again been denied to the king by acts of 
local legislation — tiiat of filling the country with slaves. 
It was at the threshold insisted that the whole territory 
south of Ohio should be resigned to slavery. The acqui- 



13 

sition of Louisiana was its next conquest ; then Florida 
and Texas followed ; and when part of Mexico, where 
slavery had been abolished, was annexed, the Union was 
put in hazard to compel the restoration of this royal insti- 
tution to hold that wide region in abeyance for settlement 
by the masters of the South. California, although knock- 
ing at the door of Congress with her free constitution in 
her hand, was denied admittance but on a compromise 
making the rest of the Mexican acquisition accessible to 
slavery. This struggle for territory on the part of the 
privileged proprietaries of the institution was not to ob- 
tain room for its occupation. Vast regions were already 
held vacant by the black laborers, that like the dog in the 
manger could not use that from which it excluded the 
only species of emigration that could be relied on to turn 
it to account. 

But the privileged order of chivalry had on })olitical 
considerations an eagerness for expansion that was insati- 
able. The paucity of their numbers rendered it necessary 
that extensive spaces should be consecrated to slavery, to 
make States with sparse populations to create Senators, 
and to put distance between the species of emigration they 
cherished and that of the intelligent free race that 
threatened the power that reposed upon it. The battle 
which this power had fought for Missouri and won, result- 
ing in a pacification fixing a northern limit, beyond which 
slavery was not to pass, although for a quarter of a century 
exulted in as a slavery triumph, securing all that was de- 
sirable to the South, became a mortification when Kansas 
was opened up to emigration preparatory to admission into 
the Union. It presented another temptation like that of 
Missouri to the spirit of soutliern ascendency. The Mis- 
souri compact which excluded slavery from Kansas was 
violated under the corrupt influence exerted through bar- 
gains for the Presidency with Pierce and Buchanan — suc- 
cessively the candidates nominated and elected by the man- 
agement of the chivalry for the purpose of its surrender. 
The strategy failed. Tlie South was defeated in the war 



14 

it waged for Kansas. It was defeated notwithstanding 
official frauds and perjuries were perpetrated in aid of 
violence to secure its submission , and although the schemes 
were assisted by all the art and influence of the two per- 
fidious Presidents engaged to eifect it. 

It was this first repulse to the ambition of that privileged 
order, by long indulgence made arrogant, followed by the 
election of President Lincoln, pledged to resist the further 
encroachment of slavery in territory where freedom was 
established, that liurried into birth the long-brooded-over 
revolt against the Piepublic. Mr. Buchanan's nomination 
to the Presidency had been obtained from the South by the 
solemn pledge, made in his name, by his Attorney Gen- 
eral, Mr. Black, to the southern delegation in convention : 

" WldtJie?' thou goest, I will go ; where thou lodgest, I iviU 
" lodge ; thy people shall he my peojole, and thy God my God." 

The conspiracy against the Union was well understood 
by Mr. Buchanan long before this vow was made to its ^ 
principal authors. Its decisive overt act, in violation of 
the Missouri compact and the seizure of Kansas, was then 
flagrant, and this scriptural adjuration was to mark, with 
signal force, his adhesion to the trea,son ; and he was not 
found false to this fellowship. His whole term in the 
Presidency rendered the Government an instrumentality 
in the hands of its enemies. Their most unscrupulous 
agents were made heads of Departments, and when war 
was openly proclaimed by the thunder of cannon on Fort 
Sumter and trailing the flag of the country in its dust and 
ashes, it was found that the free States of the Union jiad 
been disarmed, the Navy dispersed in distant seas, the 
officers of the Army corrupted to surrender themselves 
and it, the South filled with munitions of war withdrawn 
from the loyal section, and the forts, ports, mints, cus- 
tom-houses, all opened up to the conspirators, who had 
prei)ared in secrecy under the hiighthood of the Golden 
Circle a force to take possession of them, and at the same 
time the State governments to supplant by a military 
jurisdiction that of the United States over the whole south- 



15 

ern region wliicli the nation liad conquered from Great 
Britain and purchased from France and Spain. Mr. Bu- 
chanan, to prove his faith to his allies who thus triumph- 
ed through his perfidy over the Government, gave them in 
his last message to Congress most efficient " aid and com- 
fort," enforcing, by executive authority, the dictum that 
the United States had no constitutional power to '' coerce " 
the restoration of the rights or property of which it had 
been stripped. And he remained faithful to them to the 
end. After the retirement of General Cass from the Cabi- 
net, who withdrew because he considered the refusal on 
the part of the President and his Cabinet to maintain 
Fort Sumter against the rebels an overt act of treason, an 
agreement was entered into with the enemy in furtherance 
of the object of that treason. Buchanan's administration 
actually stipulated with that of Davis for an armistice 
which afforded time to the latter to accomplish his de- 
sign, and this was officially signed by the respective Sec- 
retaries on the part of the contracting Cabinets. But this 
betrayal by the Executive of the United States would have 
produced a short-lived success had it not been supported 
by the two standing armies kept on hand by the chivalry 
of the South — armies that are the offspring of that pecu- 
liar institution to which the order itself owes its birth. 
The antagonism of the black and white castes of laborers 
of the South creates the double forces which maintain the 
oligarchy over both. The antipathies between the Papists 
and Protestants of Ireland is the strength of the English 
vice-royalty over the island. The apprehensions of negro 
equality on the part of the non-slaveholders renders them 
fanatically devoted to the designs of that class whose am- 
bition and mercenary interests proclaim a war to prevent 
the emancipation feared as a transformation, elevating the 
blacks and degrading the whites. The slaves, disciplined 
to obedience, and in the presence of a soldiery composed of 
that stern class that held the lash over them from infan- 
cy, and now armed for their destruction on a hesitating 
look, make an embodied force of stout, acclimated, skill- 



16 

ful pioneers, willing tliough unpaid, and proud of tlie 
change from tlie fields of the plantation to those of the 
camp. These are the men that threw up the batteries 
that struck the colors of Fort Sumter, the men who dug 
the rifle pits and made and partly manned the redoubts 
which broke our first army at Bull Run, the men that 
created the fortifications at Richmond, Charleston, Savan- 
nah, Mobile, Port Hudson, Vicksburg. They constitute 
the army of the trenches, while every man of their breth- 
ren left in the crops at home sends and supports a white 
substitute to fight the battles in the field. Can any one 
deny the share the negro has in creating the armies of the 
South, when it is known that the military government 
there has ordered grain to be cultivated there as the exclu- 
sive crop, and has conscripted the slaves of the planters to 
work them under military overseers when the owner has 
refused the office, and that nevertheless, famine stares 
their soldiers in the face ? But for the slaves everywhere 
pressed to provide against these deficient supplies, the 
ranks of the rebel army would be thinned to make bread 
for the families at home and the remnant of their comrades. 
It was even the boast of the nullifiers in the early time of 
their intimidation that their institutions, like the Spar- 
tans', enabled them to make every freeman a soldier. 

Slavery was thus to become the sure foundation of their 
republic, and it is, we see, the basis of the despotic mili- 
tary rule which subjects the South under a dictator, and 
sheds the blood of the North in torrents, to defend itself 
and the whole Union against the frenzied ambition of the 
chivalry, that hoped to make cotton king over the cabinets 
of Europe, and the negro institution the throne of a king 
over this Continent. It was in this spirit that it sent out 
its fillibusters in Cuba, in Central America, and sought 
an alliance with a revolutionary party in Mexico, to restore 
the reign of slavery in that republic. It was in this view 
that Toombs, who apes the oratory of Mirabeau, in con- 
vulsing the South, announced that it would make ^'- the 
" Gulf of Mexico its mare clausum," and " call the roll of its 



17 

' ' Slaves on Bunher Hill. " The maniac is n o w fettered , but 
if lie had broken our army at Antietam or Gettysburg, 
could our unarmed farmers and citizens have arrested him 
in his way to Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York, 
with an army flushed with victory, and bearing the arms 
and spoils of ours ? Might lie not_ have bribed mobs like 
that which held our emporium for three days in terror, to 
take tlie arms won from us in the fields of battle, and join 
liim in the plunder and conflagrations of our cities ? 

I have not made this recapitulation of the causes origi- 
nating, and the consequences flowing from the bloody re- 
bellion that shakes our country, to embitter animosities on 
either side. My effort is to expose to view the rooted evil, 
lohicli must he extracted, if we luould relieve the nation from 
its convulsions. Slavery, as a great element of society, 
makes slaves of all associated, with it, by the passions it 
inflames: the masters, by the ambition it inspires— the 
masses, with which it mingles, by the deadly contagion it 
spreads in a thousand forms. It is marked in the Decla- 
ration of Independence as the most virulent poison instilled 
by the king, to enfeeble for subjugation, the people on 
whom he made war, and it has proved, the most potent in- 
gredient that could be employed for the dissolution of the 
fabric of free government, which withstood the king's 
attempt. If the virus he infused, which was strong 
enough amid the enthusiasm for new-born freedom, to 
stifle the voice of the Declaration of Independence, de- 
nouncing slavery, and has kept the free Government — the 
hard-earned prize of the revolutionary war — in tremor 
ever since, is it now, when it has been poured out Avith 
the nation's blood in the fratricidal war, it forced on the 
country, again to be admitted into the system ? 

What patriotic party will sanction such a suggestion? 
The people of the slave 'States will repudiate slaver^', when 
the duress of the rebellion is removed. Missouri and 
Western Virginia have already formally renounced it, 
and the recent votes of Delaware, and our own dear Mary- 
land, manifest tlieir purpose to renounce it at once. In 
2 



18 

Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas, the indi- 
cations are also decisive. The proclamation of the Presi- 
ident to deprive the enemy of this greatest element of 
power, this sinew of war exerted at all points, has an- 
nounced the extinction of slavery, as essential to tlie suc- 
cess of the measures he has been compelled to adopt to 
conquer a peace for the Union. The armies of the Ee- 
puhlic are on the march to accomplish the aims which 
have been submitted without reserve to the decision of 
public opinion, and they have the support of the people's 
suffrage. What, then, is the duty of all who are sensible 
that the war is an inevitable evil, from which there 
is no safe or honorable deliverance, but by supporting 
with united strength and counsels the Chief Magistrate, 
to whose conduct the issue is committed, and in whose 
avowed designs the nation has voted its confidence ? Are 
there any who would rescind the votes of the border States, 
and re-establish slavery therein ? Are there any who 
would annul the proclamation to reinvigorate the insti- 
tution so skillfully plied to instigate the war, and so 
essential to provide the means for its prosecution? 

The Democratic party of the North was seduced to 
countenance the measures of the southern oligarchs, pre- 
paratory to the war against the Union, under the idea that 
they were designed as mere menace, and were really con- 
servative. The event has shown that the whole policy of 
the dominant class in the South, has been Avar for absolute 
dominion in the slave States — -war to extend tlic despotic 
system on which it built, at home and abroad. Is this the 
conservatism to which Democracy anywhere should lend 
itself? Bulwer, though a Tory, has this aphorism in 
one of his late papers : '^ A true conservative policy for a 
^^nation is the policy of progress; " and he gives his conserv- 
ative friends the admonition that "resistance to progress 
" is destructive to conservatism." The Democracy was in 
its better day a progressive party. Would it not be an 
advance backwards to restore the slave institution to the 
position it has lost in being used during the greater part 



19 

of a century, covertly at first, but now in open rebellion, 
to destroy tlie free Government by which it had been tole- 
erated, only in the hope it would have been gradually 
thrown off, under the influence of public sentiment ? 
When the masters of millions of slaves have boldly pro- 
claimed slavery the best basis of government, and founded 
on it the military despotism they have set up within the 
jurisdiction of the United States, with the avowed purpose 
of superseding its authority, what friend of the Union — 
what friend of free government — can hesitate to strike 
down that system which endangers both? The plea that 
slavery is a local institution, not to be dealt with by Fed- 
eral authority, was universally admitted to be true, till 
that institution engendered a rebellion which, by an ad- 
mission equally universal, seriously imjierils the existence 
of the national Government. It could not be called a 
Government, if, in virtue of the right of self defence, com- 
mon alike to Governments and individuals, under such 
circumstances it could not destroy its enemies. 

It is absurd to consider the war now raging as one meant 
to draw a line between coterminous nationalities. It is a 
war in the bosom of one nationality, of a people of the 
same race and language, on an arena bounded by the lakes, 
the ocean, the Gulf, and the great tributary streams that 
unite and insulate and mark it as the domain of one great 
Government. It is a war of principle and for dominion. 
If the dynasty founded on the slave system triumphs, it 
will give law to the continent. If it fails, as fail it must, 
unless the tendency of the age becomes inverted, there is an 
end of slavery among civilized nations. What a humili- 
ating contrast is presented for the new world in the attempt 
of Jefferson Davis and his coadjutor rebels striving to fet- 
ter their poorer and more ignorant fellow-citizens in the 
chains of their four millions of negro slaves ; while the 
Autocrat of the Russias proclaims the freedom of forty mil- 
lions of serfs, delivering them from the yoke of a haughty 
nobility and his own right of seigniory, and establishing 
them as freeholders ! 



20 

Oitr Avould-bc nobility of slave creation has thrown down 
the gage of battle for the slave system against the free 
system of government. When the batteries at Charleston 
poured their hot shot into the fortress built and armed and 
manned by the nation to protect that city from foreign 
invasion, under wliich it had twice fallen^ it signified a 
war of fire and sword against the nationality founded by 
our forefathers to secure the liberties for which our coun- 
trymen fought and conquered. The Democracy of the 
North rose as one man with the Republicans, in whose 
hands the elections had placed the Administration, to de- 
fend the cause of freedom and the Union. The Democ- 
racy then saw the conflict in which this act involved the 
country in its true aspect. Every step in its progress 
proves that it was a war waged for military supremacy on 
the side of the assailants — for the liberty and nationality 
it secures on tlie other. Foreign kings and emperors are 
invoked to join with tlie conspirators in making a Avreck 
of the Eepublic. and share in the advantages to be derivedl 
from its ruin. Pirates, bearing the flag of the rebellion 
and fitted out under the auspices of wealthy speculators, 
looking for remuneration in the. plunder of our commerce, 
disgrace tlic civilization of tiie age by robberies and con- 
flagrations on the high seas. In such a Avar — a war fort 
freedom on one side and slavery on the other- — no perma- 
nent peace can be patched up. To endure, there must be 
submission to the Government as constituted by our fath 
ers, or as it Avould be constituted by Mr. Davis and hi 
military adherents. Any compromise or partition treaty 
would give but a breathing spell for fresh preparations forf 
a renewed struggle. ; 

May we not hope, as there is no escape from an issue soi 
forced upon us, that the Democracy of the North will, as f 
at the threshold of the war, be found with the great majority if 
of the constituency of the loyal States, zealously battling fort 
the right, which every patriot, of whatever party, holds to bej 
with the Government of the Union ? It has taken the standlf^ 
that the extinction of the slave institution is essential to 



21 

save the Union, and perpetuate the Government which it 
has put in jeopardy. The armies of the Union iighfc to make 
prisoner of this giant of the war on the side of our adver- 
saries. Once withdrawn from them, he takes from them 
the motives and the means of continuing the conflict. 

The partisan who' may thwart the brave men that risk 
their lives in battling for a consummation alike patriotic 
and humane, will, on the return of the maimed veterans 
to their homes, covered with laurels and honorable scars, 
hide his diminished head in obscurity forever. 

In ordinary contests of opinion between parties, the 
utmost virulence of expression is soon forgiven and for- 
gotten. But when war strikes the country, the man who 
withholds support to the soldiers who offer their lives in 
its defense, or disables their efforts by words or acts favor- 
ing the cause of the enemy, never recovers its confidence. 
What w£ts the fate of the public men who took sides with 
England in the war of the Kevolution, or that of 1812? 

The political convulsions of 1798-'9&, ending in the 
election of Mr. Jefferson, was characterized by more bit- 
terness, with a party frenzy more intense, than when blood 
flowed in battles on the field. But the ill spirit vanished 
Like the spectre of a morning's dream, when Mr. Jefferson 
rose to the nation's chief honor, and the country was re- 
lieved of the apprehensions of the loss of the election 
nade by the people. The struggle had been on one side 
o consolidate the Federal power, and by construction, 
^ive it the tone and tendency of the British Government ; 
m the other, to assert State rights and popular sovereignty, 
)y strict adherence to the republican model presented in 
jhe Constitution. Tliis, fliirly construed, embraced the 
Opinions of both contending parties. They were recon- 
led in the admirable inaugural address, which allayed 
jy partisan fury in its assertion of what was true of the great 
■j >ody of the people : " We are all Eepublicans — all Feder- 
als. ' ' It may be truly said now, speaking the sense of the 
asses of our countrymen, ''We are all Republicans — all 
' Democrats." Exclude the conspirators and the slave in- 



22 

stitution, which they have shaped into a glut to split the 
Union ; exclude the conspirators, and those whom slavery 
has made their slaves, and our countrymen are at this 
moment ''all Democrats — all Kepuhlicans'' — asserting 
popular sovereignty, the right of self government, the 
rights of the States, the nationality of the Union — all de- 
fined, balanced, checked, and hound together in the re- 
publican form of government inherited from our fathers. 
May it he perpetual ! 



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